If you haven’t heard, it’s official—Bing and Yahoo, two major players in the search engine world, recently merged to form one company. The marriage between these two internet bigwigs has lead inquisitive minds to wonder, from internet users, to business owners, to SEO’s: What kind of changes will result from this corporate integration?

Here are the cold, hard facts—

Press releases have issued an official statement that confirms Yahoo will control Bing’s MSN Ad center for paid links, while Bing will reign over Yahoo’s organic search results listings.

But our burning questions persist:

Will Bing and Yahoo’s collaboration create one super-powered search engine that can compete with King Google? Will it change how we (the users) search?  How much will it shake up existing organic business rankings?  How will the Bing/Yahoo partnership affect SEO practices?

Unfortunately there aren’t any definite answers to these questions; but there are certain elements to keep an eye on in 2010 that will likely reveal crucial clues about the changes taking place in the realm of search engine marketing:

Look out for:

Search engine algorithm changes—

These are the contributing factors that affect search engine results.  For example, it’s been hypothesized that the birth of Google Caffeine will alter the criteria for organic rankings.

Blended searches—

We’ve recently seen that Google search results have become much more blended, incorporating different types of categories into results pages; multimedia, real time news, and social networking content is now being indexed with written content.  It’s likely that Bing/Yahoo will follow suit due to the publics’ increasingly influential role on marketing and product branding (thanks to the popularity of interactive online media.)

Content Format—

The old rules still apply for SEO-related content in 2010– relevant, high quality writing is always of utmost importance.  Content structure will likely be of special import in 2010, however, since there is a much higher volume of content being indexed on the whole (thanks to blended search results.)  Make content index-friendly by maintaining an organized and hierarchical structure with pointed keywords. This will let search engine spiders more quickly and easily index your site content.

Where visitors come from–

It’s more important than ever to gather information about where your site visitors are coming from since there are so many available SEO leveraging resources. Collecting and analyzing information about where visitors come from will allow you to pinpoint your target audience and effectively concentrate your SEO efforts, identifying the most valuable strategies for your particular business.

Stay tuned for more updates and exciting revelations in 2010…